North south university

Project Report on
Medicine Clash Detector

Under the guidance of

North South University, Bashundhara, Dhaka-1229, BANGLADESH

Submitted By
(CSE299 – Sec-05)

(Group-01)

Fahim Ahmed Shakil- 1610736042

Acknowledgement
Objective
To build a smartphone application that will be able to alert users if they are taking medicines
that are not supposed to be taken together that is the medicines clashes.
The application will also be able to alert the user if he/she is taking a medicine that might be
problematic due to his/her health condition (such as heart disease, high blood pressure, etc.)

Motivation
In our country, people are always taking medicines in their own without even consulting doctors. As a
result, they sometimes take medicine which unbeknownst to them do more harm than good because
they might have certain disease or the medicines are not supposed to be taken together. This motivated
us to build an application that will help people in not taking drugs that clashes with each other or
harmful due to certain health condition.

Table of Contents
Contents Page no.

Problem Statement 01

Introduction 01

Literature Review 01

Target User 01

User Study 01

Questionnaire 01

Methodology 01

Software/Hardware Requirements 01

Result 01

Conclusion 01

Reference 01

Appendix 01

Problem Statement
While a doctor prescribe medicines to a patient, he/she should be aware of the medical history
of the patient. Also a person should not be able to buy medicines from a pharmacy without a
prescription.
However, in our country, it is quite easy to buy medicines from pharmacy without a proper
prescription. Also most people in our country, do not keep the records of the medicines they
have taken and in most cases doctors have no way of knowing about the medical history of
patients.
As a consequence, people end up taking medicines that are not supposed to be taken together
or harmful to them because of they may have certain medical conditions e.g. diabetes, high
blood pressure, kidney disease etc.
In response to this, we are planning on making a smartphone application which will be able to
find out if a user should not take a medicine because the user have certain health condition or
taking another medicine which clashes with this new medicine.

Introduction
This software product is being developed for patients; keeping in mind the situation of
Bangladesh. In our country most of the people go to the doctors however they like. This causes
a problem which is, the doctors who are prescribing the medicines for the same patient do not
have any idea what the other doctors have prescribed. As a result there could be prescribed
medicines which could potentially clash with each other. This could be fatal. Our goal is to solve
this problem. We will have application both for Android and IOS platforms. Our application will
alert users if they are taking medicines which could clash with each other or if the medicine
they are taking might not be suitable for them because of their certain health conditions.
Literature Review
We are building Android application that will be able to notify people about the medicines they
are taking whether they conflict or whether the medicines are unsuitable due to their health
conditions.
For the application to work, we are going to build a database where we will store generic name
of medicines, brand names of medicines, side effect of the medicines, for which health
conditions the medicine should not be taken. We will also save a list of health condition in our
system. Our algorithm will work based on the generic names of the medicines, so when a user
will add a medicine using its brand name, the application will find out its generic name from
the database and then use that in the algorithm to find out whether the medicine will clash
with any other medicine the user might be taking.
The application will have very few features to make it very easy to use. Every user will have
their personal account which they will be able to create using their email or by using their
Facebook/Google id.
The basic features of the application are - add medicine, check health condition, remove
medicine, check clash report. To “add medicine”, a user can type the name of the medicine or
scan the medicine and the name of the medicine will automatically be added to their list of
medicines. We are going to use “Google’s Mobile Vision API” to read name of the medicine
from scanned image. In our system, we will create a database which will have list of medicines
name stored. Whenever a user scan the name of a medicine, if it matches any name from the
list of stored medicine names it will ask the user to verify the name. If the user press “Yes”,
then the medicine will be added to the user’s medicine list. If a medicine is not available in the
list of medicine names stored in the database, then user will not be able to add that particular
medicine in his/her list of medicines.
We will provide a list of health condition and users will be able to check whether they have any
of the health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure etc. Users will be
able to check multiple health conditions or none at all.
Users will be able to delete medicines from their list of medicine.
Using the “check clash report” users will be able to see if any of the medicines they are taking
clashes with each other or their health conditions. After users add a new medicine, the system
will first find out its generic name and then look through users’ medicine list to find out
potential clash with other medicine. Then it will look through users’ health condition check the
database of for that particular medicine whether the medicine is unsuitable for any of the
health conditions users have checked.
The final view of the finished application will look as the following –

Target User
Anyone who uses a smartphone is our targeted user. To be more specific, any Bangladeshi
citizen who has access to smartphone and likely to buy medicines on their own without
consulting doctors is our targeted user.

User Study
N/A

Questionnaire
Q: How will the application recognize same drugs from different brands?
Answer: The algorithm we are going to use for the application will use the generic/scientific
name of the medicines to find out clashes with other medicines. So when users will add
medicine by using the brand names; the application will first search for its generic name in the
database and then will store the generic name in user’s medicine list. So to generate clash
report, we are going to use generic names of medicines instead of the brand names.

Methodology
For the development of our application, we have decide to adopt Rapid Application
Development methodology. Rapid application development (RAD) is an agile project
management strategy popular in software development. The key objectives of RAD are: high
quality systems, faster development and delivery and low costs [1]. The benefits of RAD
methodology are that – it helps to break the project in small module, reduces planning time
and emphasizes on prototype iterations [2]. As a result, it is ideal for developing software in
short time. For this reason, we have decided to adopt RAD methodology for our application
development.
Software/Hardware Requirements
We are going to build a smartphone application for Android platform. As this is a software
based project, there is no hardware requirements.
The software requirements are as following:

 We are going to write the application in Kotlin.

Result
N/A

Conclusion
We are building a smartphone app that will help people from not taking medicines that might
harm them. According to the current scenario of our currently, this app can potentially help
people from suffering terrible fate. Even though we are building our application for Android
platform, our future goal is to make it available in other platforms such as IOS, website etc.

Reference
[1], [2] P Beynon-Davies, C Carne1, H Mackay and D Tudhope. Rapid application development
(RAD): an empirical review, European Journal of Information Systems (1999) Volume 8, Page
Number: 211–223.

Appendix
N/A